The Tenant
Page 3
“You’re saying she was cut before she died?” Jeppe asked.
Nyboe nodded seriously as they both fell silent. This would obviously cause an uproar in the media and instill a general state of panic, not to mention the reaction of the poor next of kin.
“Her face is quite battered, but luckily she has a tattoo, which will make identification easier. Well, you should probably take a look at the carvings.”
“Carvings?” Jeppe caught Nyboe’s eye.
“The perpetrator cut lines in the victim’s face. I’m no art expert, but it looks to me like a kind of paper cutting.” Nyboe sighed resignedly.
“Paper cutting? What’s that supposed to mean?” Jeppe said, furrowing his brow.
“It appears our perpetrator has carved us a little gækkebrev.”
Nyboe took hold of the body’s chin and carefully tilted the bloody face up into the kitchen’s sharp light. The pattern cut into the face resembled the traditional paper cuttings that Danish children make for Easter.
Jeppe’s expectations for the day went from bad to worse.
CHAPTER 3
Esther buttoned her vintage Halston blazer in front of her full-length mirror, carefully smoothing it. Wearing thin wool slacks and a silk blouse, she felt almost too nicely dressed, too formal, but she needed an outfit that would sustain her today.
Her mind was reeling, and a headache weighed behind her eyes. Julie or Caroline? It couldn’t be Julie, mustn’t be her. But it couldn’t be Caroline, either. Little Caroline, whom she had known since she was born. How likely was it that the victim could have been someone else? One of the girls’ friends, maybe, who had borrowed the apartment, spent the night and invited some suspicious character in?
Kristoffer had let himself in and was making noise in the kitchen. She wished he would be quiet. He had been her singing teacher for almost four years, but over time their relationship had evolved. They had a lot in common: their enjoyment of music, art, and all the beautiful things in life. He taught her vocal techniques, she taught him how to cook; they routinely went to operas and museums together. Kristoffer even had a key to her apartment and helped himself to money from her purse when going grocery shopping. She was three times his age, but still he had become a close friend. In some ways the son she had never had, although neither of them would have been comfortable phrasing it that way.
“Kristoffer, dear,” she called. “Are you making coffee?”
Esther walked into the living room to find him already pouring from the French press at the table. She smiled at him, delighted as always by his handsome face, which told tales of a distant Asian ancestry. His eyes were brown, his hair jet-black, and his body lanky. He always wore clothes several sizes too big: a hoodie with his T-shirt sticking out, jeans with the crotch down near his knees, a beanie, and a leather jacket. The clothes made him look even younger than he was, like a homeless teenager.
Kristoffer had given up on a promising singing career in exchange for random gigs and teaching. She didn’t really know why. But he seemed content with his current primary employment as a dresser at the Royal Danish Theatre, which allowed him to stay up at night to work on his odd electronic music and also fit in lessons with his select few singing students.
Esther slouched into the peach-colored wing-back armchair, putting her feet up on the matching pouf. She actually understood him well. Now that she had retired, she too intended to do only what she really wanted, for the rest of her life. Sing, write, and cook. No more exams or faculty meetings ever again! Esther had been waiting a long time to finally return to the love of her youth—the murder mystery, so maligned in academic circles. If she was going to become her generation’s Dorothy L. Sayers, time was of the essence. She eyed the stack of freshly printed manuscript pages that she was supposed to have gone through already, and sighed. It definitely wasn’t happening today.
Kristoffer brought over her coffee cup and sat down on a Moroccan floor pillow facing her. Epistéme and Dóxa immediately climbed onto his lap.
“What happened downstairs?” he asked with the innocence of another universe. It made it even harder for her to answer.
“A… a body was discovered on the first floor. A young woman—they don’t know who. But it sounds serious. Foul play.” Her throat felt tight and she took a sip of her coffee. “And Gregers is in the hospital with a stroke or something. The whole world seems to be falling apart today.”
Kristoffer stroked Dóxa’s belly without looking up. Others would have asked panicky questions, overwhelmed by shock, but not Kristoffer. After a minute he merely asked, “What can I do?”
“The dogs need to be walked.” Esther felt gratitude wash through her, making everything a little easier to bear. “And if would you fix us some food for tonight?”
“Okay.” He nodded, still looking down. “I’ll take the dogs for a walk and shop for dinner. Maybe fish. I’ll see what they have down at the good fishmonger on Frederiksborggade.”
“Thank you, dear. Just take money from the purse in the hallway. You know where.” Esther leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and tried some breathing exercises to relax.
She could hear Kristoffer clinking in the hallway with dog collars and keys. He opened the door and gently ushered the dogs out into the stairwell. They immediately started barking.
“Is this where the owner of the building lives?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
Esther sat up and peered into the front hall. Kristoffer stood surrounded by the barking pugs, facing a man dressed in white.
“Yes, that’s right,” she yelled.
With some difficulty she got up from the deep chair and walked out to the front hall to greet the man. One of the crime scene technicians she had seen going in and out of the building the whole morning was standing in her doorway. He had unzipped his protective white suit, and a red line on his forehead revealed that he must have recently taken off his hood.
“I’m here to take your fingerprints,” he said, edging his way past Kristoffer and into the small foyer.
“Lovely,” Esther said, extending her hand. “They told me to expect someone. Esther de Laurenti, hello.”
The man set a heavy-looking briefcase on the floor without accepting the offered handshake. It had to be a tough job collecting evidence at a crime scene like this. Esther’s stomach clenched at the thought of what lay down on the first floor of her building.
“How do we do this?” she asked. “What do you need?”
“A table and your hands, that’s all. It’ll only take a second.” Esther rolled up her sleeves and led the way to her desk. To her surprise she saw Kristoffer still standing in the doorway, and she stopped to give him a warm smile. He looked stricken. Clearly he was just as shocked as she.
The wasp finally buzzes away from the jam-covered crumbs on the little plate and settles on a pile of books. A firm smack with the tape dispenser, and the crushed insect’s body is flung on its final flight out the open window.
She breathes in the city’s summer fragrance and decides to step out into the sunshine. Runs down the crooked stairs, hops on her bike, and zips through downtown Copenhagen. She rides down the narrow one-way streets, enjoying how the wind makes her eyes water. Buys a cup of coffee she can’t afford, and sits in the sun outside the café.
In her hometown there were no cafés. Chest tightening, she recalls the cold nights of her early youth—wearing a thin denim jacket, restlessly hanging out alternately at gas stations and soccer fields. The kids would all roam around in the dark, none of them wanting to be home. As if their aimless walking could take them anywhere. As if sipping Polish vodka from old Coke bottles could obliterate the boredom. When they tired of walking, they would hang out at the transit stop, watching buses drive by.
She lifts her face to the sun and enjoys her new life. The life. She doesn’t notice the man watching her a little way off. She doesn’t know the life she has just started enjoying is about to end.
CHAPTER 4
“Are we sure about the identification?” Anette began.
Now that they were seated across from each other, he noticed, much to his annoyance, how vigorous she looked compared to him. Her eyelids sported a fresh layer of blue, and she looked like someone who had had sex, a hearty meal, and eight hours of undisturbed sleep within the last twenty-four hours. It made him want to walk around the desk and tip her out of her chair.
Her question was rhetorical. They had compared the dead body’s general appearance and tattoo—two stars and some cursive text on the right wrist—with the many pictures they had found on the laptop from the crime scene. The victim was Julie Stender, one of Esther de Laurenti’s two young tenants on the first floor. If they’d have tried to ID the body based solely on its battered face, they probably wouldn’t have been able to.
“It’s clearly Julie,” Jeppe said. “Let’s see… her family lives in…” He flipped through his notepad. “Her parents live in a small town called Sørvad, in Jutland somewhere near the town of Herning. Can you look them up?”
Anette typed on her computer and then called the Central and West Jutland Police to get the ball rolling. This was not a call the Jutland police would be pleased to field. Jeppe turned a page in his notepad. When he was younger, he used to write everything in his notepads—ideas, thoughts, and plans for the future. Travel journals and love letters. Now he only logged work stuff in them.
He printed KNIFE PATTERN using ornate capital letters.
MALE ACQUAINTANCES
CAROLINE! he added.
TENANTS IN THE BUILDING
“Stender!” Anette barked into the phone. “S-T-E-N-D-E-R, got it? Christian and Ulla Stender. They live outside Sørvad on a street called Skovvej. Just inform them; don’t question—got it? We are coming out from Copenhagen to do that. Call us back after you’ve been there.”
She hung up without saying goodbye.
“There, you can cross that off your list, Jepsen!” she said standing up abruptly so that her slacks creased in unbecoming folds high on her broad thighs. “Should we get going with that briefing? We’ve got a shitload of work to divvy up.”
She marched off without waiting for a response. Jepsen! He hated it when she called him that. It made him feel like an insecure teenager being chastised by his older sister.
Jeppe’s heart sank thinking how the next few days were likely to go. This case would shut down Copenhagen once the media hit on it. He could already picture the headlines: “Young Woman Murdered, Abused, and Battered. Murderer Still at Large.” This was a case the police would normally brush off as wildly exaggerated—a woman-on-the-forest-floor case, meaning unlikely, happening mainly in crime fiction. Cases like this, where the perpetrator was not stooping over the victim when the police arrived, were in fact extremely rare. But they existed. And this was one.
* * *
THE STAFF ROOM was uncharacteristically quiet when Jeppe walked in. Normally it echoed with conversations and a cheerful hum, but serious investigations always sunk the mood. Jokes about sawed-off heads serving as soccer balls were a crude daily staple of the job. Certain other topics were totally off-limits, such as anything to do with children, or cases where the perpetrator got off due to shoddy work by investigators, or technicalities. And cases like this one. Violent criminals and murderers don’t normally cut into their victims while they’re alive. It was too early to guess whether they were dealing with a sadistic ex-lover or something even worse, but nonetheless, an oppressive silence hung over the staff.
Sitting beside Detective Thomas Larsen was the superintendent, her arms folded over her uniformed chest. She was probably dressed for the imminent press conference. Even though they hadn’t discussed it, Jeppe knew she would try to keep the knife-work pattern on the victim’s face secret from the public for as long as possible. Any details that suggested a seriously deranged perpetrator would be kept in-house for the time being.
How long would that give them?
One day, max two, but that was better than nothing. Jeppe’s eyes met the superintendent’s, and instantly he felt both reassured and nervous about her presence. After ten years of working together, they knew each other well. She understood his strengths but also his weaknesses. They both knew she was taking a chance by entrusting him with a case of this magnitude right now.
He looked his team over.
Torben Falck was one of the older detectives, who had grown round and complacent with the years. He took zealous care of his impressive, graying mustache, wore brightly colored suspenders, and excelled in making bad puns. If Homicide were a baseball team, Falck would be an indispensable outfielder. Maybe not the fastest, but a solid and thorough investigator.
Sara Saidani, next to Falck, was a bit of an enigma on Homicide. The superintendent had brought her over from the station in Helsingør a year ago for her coding expertise and her general ability to maneuver online—skills that made her far more useful in Copenhagen than elsewhere. But Saidani hadn’t yet found her place among her new colleagues. She had a certain charm with her dark curls and aquiline nose, but she seemed aloof, saying only what she needed, and never with a smile. Her hair was generally up in an untidy ponytail, her face makeup-free. She was a single mother of two daughters, and because she had no man in her life, Anette insisted Saidani must be a lesbian.
It didn’t matter to Jeppe. Both Saidani and Falck were good at their jobs and responsive; they fit in well enough. The one he did have a problem with was Thomas Larsen. He was a young detective, notorious for looking like a model from a jeans ad. His university degree was from Copenhagen Business School, and he had been an investigator at HQ for only six months. Even so, he seemed poised to advance at interstellar speed. There was something shameless about Larsen’s ambition, a provocative faith in his own infallibility that Jeppe could barely stand. He had tried and tried to get the nickname Butterfinger to stick to Larsen, but his otherwise-mischievous colleagues hadn’t taken the bait. And unfortunately, peanut butter appeared to be the superintendent’s favorite flavor.
Anette cleared her throat encouragingly from her regular spot by the wall.
The detectives’ eyes hit Jeppe like spotlights from a dark auditorium, and he felt a pang of stage fright. Now it was up to him to bring justice to a brutally murdered young woman.
“Okay, then,” he began from the front of the staff room. “Everyone is aware that the body found at Klosterstræde Twelve has been identified as a Julie Stender. We are in the process of locating her next of kin. Until further notice, we will be meeting here daily right after the end of each duty shift, eight o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon, plus additional times as needed. We’ll all brief one another on developments. Let’s gather all the paperwork and photos in Anette’s and my office. I’ll have one of the secretaries prepare a bulletin board for us. At the video briefing, we will request backup from the other stations for door-to-door and street-level questioning along Klosterstræde so that we can take any witness statements while they’re fresh in people’s minds.”
Jeppe raised his voice over the sounds of rustling paper and clacks on keyboards. “Falck,” he continued, “you go back to the hospital and talk to Gregers Hermansen, if he’s up to it. Afterward, visit the owners of the café at Klosterstræde Twelve. They’re two young guys, the secretary has their names. They were the ones who found Gregers Hermansen lying on top of Stender’s body this morning, and they’re also currently at the national hospital under observation for shock. As far as I understand, they’re okay.”
Falck saluted in the Cub Sc
out manner with two fingers off the brim of an imaginary hat.
“Larsen will start investigating Julie Stender’s family background, friends, colleagues, romantic partners, and old classmates. As always, Saidani will handle Facebook and computer-related things, phones, and social media.”
Saidani looked up from her laptop and nodded, bouncing the dark curls of her ponytail. Larsen just sat still, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Werner and I will notify the victim’s parents, then pay another visit to Esther de Laurenti. The autopsy will take place first thing tomorrow. We’ll handle that as well,” he said, looking at his partner. “We have officers in both Copenhagen and southern Sweden actively looking for Caroline Boutrup and her friend.” Jeppe discreetly shifted his weight from one leg to the other to relieve his lower back. “And we need someone to check the surveillance cameras on the route. The banks, Seven-Eleven, in front of the drugstore, and so on. Who’s on that?”
Falck gave yet another Cub Scout salute.
The ringtone of Anette’s cell phone cut through the intense mood of the staff room; she took the call without stepping out of the room. Jeppe and the team waited while she barked her loud, terse responses.
A half minute later she ended the call and looked around at them eagerly.
“That was the Central and West Jutland office. They’ve been by the family house in Sørvad, but no one was home. Guess where the neighbor says they are?”